


a comprehensive list of angels on the island of manhattan

by indigostohelit



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hipsters, Art, Homelessness, M/M, Mental Health Issues, New York City, Piano, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-10 05:34:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2012934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reader, this is a story about a piano.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a comprehensive list of angels on the island of manhattan

**Author's Note:**

> One hundred thanks to Miriam, who reined in the worst semicolons.
> 
> Warnings for depression and mental illness, panic attacks, an offscreen nervous breakdown, and offscreen implied self-harm.

In a park, in the middle of the path, there is a piano.

The path is grey, and covered with stones. It has been here for many years—more than a century—and it is surrounded by trees, which have been there even longer. Long ago, when the city was populated by the Dutch and the English, the trees had been smaller, and younger. Before that, when there had been no city at all and the island had been called Mannahatta, there had been only saplings.

The trees are calm, and strong, and they care little for the people who sit at their roots. They do not need to take an interest in the comings and goings of the folks around them. They are older than most things, and with age comes perspective.

The piano is not old. Its black paint is chipped, yes, and it is covered with dust; but this is not age but use, and the endless erosion of the out-of-doors, for which it was not built. It stands on rubber wheels, which squeak when it is moved, and beside it are three plastic buckets.

Reader, this is a story about a piano.

To be more precise: this is a story about a pianist, and a man who knew him. This is a story about an island, and a city, and three plastic buckets. This is a story, dear reader, about art; and it is, as all such stories must be, a love story.

But our story does not begin with the piano in the park; if I am to tell the truth, our story does not begin with the park at all.

It begins, instead, on an April morning.

It begins with a man.

His name is Steve Rogers, and he is uncommonly cheerful for a Monday. His hair is gold, and his eyes are blue, and he has a brown book bag slung over his shoulder, which contains a cellphone and a very large sketchpad. He is walking down the street at a pace that might even be described as jaunty, and despite the lingering cold of the night, he is not shivering. One almost expects him to break out into song.

It is because of his cheeriness, golden and brilliant and all-encompassing, that when he trips over the man sitting on the sidewalk in front of him, his fall is so utterly complete.

He hits the sidewalk facedown and sprawls; a watcher might be forgiven for thinking him an actor in a slapstick stunt. His elbow is scraped; his cheek is reddening. His book bag has flown off somewhere to the side, determinedly unwilling to be party to the event. A reader so inclined might imagine a large, red sound effect over his sprawled form.

One of his arms is bleeding. Steve sits up, his body ringing with pain, and says to the empty air, "I am _so_ sorry." 

There is no one in front of him.

He turns around and spots the object upon which he tripped: a pile of clothes, rags, and inexplicable lack of face, which coalesces into a man with long dark hair dressed entirely in black and wrapped up in a surprisingly new red blanket on the edge of the sidewalk.

"I am _so_ sorry," Steve repeats, this time directly to the man.

The man in black says nothing.

"My name's Steve Rogers," says Steve, and sticks out a hand.

This time there is a response: a hand emerges from the blanket, long-fingered and pale, nails surprisingly short and clean. Steve shakes it; it's softer than he had thought it would be.

The man in black says, his voice rusty with sleep, "I’m Bucky."

"I'm very sorry for tripping over you, Bucky," says Steve, and goes to stand up, and stops. 

Behind its curtain of hair, the man's face looks familiar.

If pressed, Steve would not be able to say where he knew it from; indeed, he is not sure if he knows it at all. Certainly Steve could not match the face with a name; certainly, if he were to try, that name would not be Bucky.

Nevertheless, Bucky's face is familiar, hauntingly familiar, enough to stop Steve in his tracks as he goes to get up—and though his office is only a few blocks away, and though he will be late for work if he hesitates for another minute, he settles himself down on the sidewalk again. 

He says, "Do I know you?"

Bucky's reaction is shocking in its vehemence—he shakes his head hard, his long hair flying, and pulls his blanket in tight around his shoulders. "No," he says. "No. You don't know me."

"All right," says Steve—though the itch of curiosity has caught him, and certainly will not vanish until it is scratched. "Do you live here, though?"

Bucky glances at him; Steve elaborates. "Here," he says, "on this street. This is my commute, my office is just over on Broadway. I've never seen you here before."

Bucky says, "You didn't see me here today," and Steve laughs, startled.

"No," he says, and looks ruefully at his bleeding elbow, "I didn't, did I?”

Bucky says nothing.

Steve presses on: “You do sleep here, then?"

Bucky glances at Steve through the curtain of dark hair hanging over his face. Then he says, "No. I sleep downtown. Over in Alphabet City." 

Steve blinks. "That's a long way away. How'd you get up here?"

"I walked," says Bucky.

"But why?" Steve says.

Inside his cocoon of blanket and black, Bucky shrugs.

The spring, dear reader, is a time of strangeness—some have said a time of madness. Whether or not madness is in the air at this moment, I cannot say; but if any of Steve Rogers' friends or coworkers were to see him there, paralyzed with hesitation in the midst of a brightening April morning, they would certainly suspect him of having lost his wits. For what Steve does then, his eyes uncertain and his mouth pursed, is to pull his cellphone out of his pocket, dial his office, and say this:

"Hello, Sharon? Can you tell Maria I won't be in today? I'm sick." A pause; then, "Just a twenty-four hour bug, I think. Thank you so much," and he ends the call, tucks his phone back into his pocket, and turns back to the man in black.

"Do you drink coffee?" he says.

Steve is, as he reveals to Bucky on their way to the cafe, an artist; specifically, an illustrator, and more specifically a drawer of pictures for children's books. He adores his work, though he cannot say he always adores the company that produces the books that he draws for; most of the books they select are bland, more are unoriginal, and not a few are outright boring. All have some sort of moral message, most of which are couched in terms so painfully condescending that Steve cannot imagine any child absorbs them.

Still, Steve tells his newfound friend, it is work—and good work, too, to bring stories to life, to be paid to draw. It's work he is happy to have, and though he will never be famous, he is talented enough that he will nearly always have a job.

He lives in Brooklyn, up in Bushwick—he makes a face when he says this, and hastily explains that he has lived in Brooklyn ever since he was a child, long before the boutiques and cafes began to sprout like mushrooms across the neighborhoods.

He is lucky enough to be able to live on his own, without having to split his rent with a roommate. He lives on the fifth story, just low enough that he feels guilty taking the elevator, and he climbs the ancient stairs up to the peeling red door every day.

He is, indeed, luckier than most—and here he stops, glances at his companion, who has his blanket in a tight bundle under his left arm, and who is walking beside him in a long, loping stride with his head down. His hair is hanging around his face.

"I'm sorry," he says, "here I am, talking on about myself, and I haven't asked you anything."

Bucky says, "It's all right,” and though Steve is not sure, he thinks there is a half-smile on his lips.

They duck through the doors of what is likely Steve's favorite coffee shop in the city, and certainly his favorite on the island—not because of any special skill in its coffeemaking or coziness in its atmosphere, but simply because he knows the owner, who is an old friend of his named Sam Wilson, and who is currently behind the counter, not arguing with a customer.

Sam, Steve knows, is very good at not arguing with customers. Not arguing with customers is, in fact, one of his most prominent talents. He doesn't argue with customers so often that Steve has learned by heart the expression he makes when an argument with a customer is not occurring: the crease between the eyebrows, the tightness of the mouth, the smile almost a rictus. When Sam isn't arguing with a customer, he doesn't argue with panache.

"Sam," Steve calls across the shop, and sees to his delight Sam's face smooth out and brighten into a grin. To be friends with Sam Wilson is to feel oneself the recipient of one's own personal source of sunshine; it is a privilege that not all enjoy, and Steve is more than glad to be one of the chosen.

Within seconds Sam has dispatched the customer, who lurks sour-eyed in a corner, and beckoned Steve over to the counter; his smile dims a little at the sight of Bucky but does not fade.

"Would you believe it," he says to Steve, "this asshole wanted a _pumpkin mocha breve._ In the first place, what the fuck, and in the second place, what the _fuck_ , and in the third place, where the hell does anyone actually make shit like that, and can I burn 'em to the ground, is _my_ question."

"Sam, this is Bucky," says Steve. Bucky, for whom the bustle of a Midtown coffeeshop is an unaccustomed sight, gives an aborted little nod; perhaps his manners are below that which society might wish, dear reader, but we shall forgive him. It has, after all, been a strange morning.

"Could we have two large lattes," Steve says to Sam. Sam, who is after all Steve's old friend, and who likes him very much, even if he does not always trust his judgment, nods slowly back at Bucky. He shouts the order over to his assistant, hidden behind the enormous and Lovecraftian apparatus of the coffee machine, and raises his eyebrows quizzically at Steve. Steve ignores him.

"But tell me about yourself," says Steve to Bucky, when they are settled at a table in the corner with their coffees, Bucky looking decidedly out of place in the warm bright goldenness of the shop, across from the warm bright goldenness that is Steve. "Are you from New York? What’s your last name? Have you been on the streets long?"

At this, Bucky makes the same little movement he had made when introduced to Sam. There is something curiously tight in his face, and his right hand twitches, the left one still buried in the blanket he has clutched to his side.

"I—don't," he says.

Steve, one of those people Nature has created with insatiable curiosity, is taken aback. "I'm sorry?" he says. He is, reader, really and genuinely sorry. It is one of the qualities his friends appreciate in him.

"I don't," says Bucky. "I don’t talk about that."

"Sleeping on the streets?" says Steve. "Oh God, I am sorry—I should've guessed, of course that's sensitive—"

"My last name," says Bucky.

There's a brief pause. He says, "Or the other thing. Sleeping on the streets, I don’t talk about that either."

"I," says Steve, and is, most uncharacteristically, inclined to press, when a most unusual thing occurs.

From the folds of the red blanket within which it has been hidden, Bucky's left hand emerges.

It is, reader, not a usual hand. A less sympathetic author might call it not a hand at all; but I will assure you that it is most certainly a hand, if not a hand the reader might be accustomed to. It is not malformed, or twisted. It does not even appear broken.

It is, instead, quite riddled with scars. Over every inch of its surface, from the finger almost to the wrist, the scars run—some pale lines faded into the skin, some long and raised, more than one might think could possibly fit onto a single hand, for Bucky's is not a wide one. It is very narrow, the fingers long—delicate, one might say, were it not for its appearance. It is almost grotesque. It is shocking.

Steve Rogers is shocked, and badly—but to his credit, dear reader, he does an admirable job of not showing it. He reaches for his drink, instead, and gulps it down, and successfully hides how badly he has been startled behind how badly he has burned his tongue.

Bucky is watching him through narrowed eyes. Steve puts his latte down and says, "How did you hurt your hand?"

"I don't talk about that," says Bucky.

"I see," says Steve, and sips at his latte again, because he is not entirely sure what else to do. "Okay."

Bucky's eyebrows fly up. "Okay?" he says. His tone is disbelieving.

"Okay," says Steve. Within him, curiosity and politeness have ended their battle; one has emerged, for now, the victor. "Do you like movies?"

Bucky says, "Movies?"

If a friend would be very, very uncertain as to the motivation behind Steve's behavior that day, his confusion would be no less shared by Steve himself.

From morning until nightfall, Bucky follows Steve through the city—to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Greek statues huddle in blank white paralysis; to the fountain of Bethesda in Central Park, her wings spread cold and stark against the sky; to the edge of the Hudson, across which spreads the eldritch grey sprawl of the cities of New Jersey; to the Manhattan Bridge, majestic in its utter and uncompromising functionality, with subway cars rushing quick and violent underneath it. 

To, finally, the Gates Avenue subway station, its stained-glass windows dark in the absence of sun, where Steve steps off the J train, and Bucky follows. 

Bucky says, "What's here?"

"My apartment," says Steve.

He has gone some way down the stairs before he realizes that Bucky is not following him.

He turns; Bucky is paralyzed at the top of the stairs, frozen for a long moment before he turns to dash back to the tracks. It is a quick jog back to where Bucky is, and Steve grabs Bucky’s hand, tugs to keep him from fleeing.

"This isn't," he says, and feels the blush rising in his own face (for he is, dear reader, a man uncomfortable with certain topics—on account of awkwardness more than modesty, and modesty more than any sense of what may or may not be appropriate), "this isn't a—a sex thing. I'm not—well, I am, but I haven't—not in a long time, and definitely not with a guy I've only just met, so. Please don't think that this was some kind of, of, of _seduction_ , or. It wasn't. Um."

Bucky appears somewhat less like a startled deer, but his eyes are hard and his mouth is tight. "I don't need your. I don't want your charity." 

"Look," says Steve, in some desperation, "I can't just go home and tell you to go back to sleeping in Alphabet City. You don't have a place to stay, I have a couch, I can't—say yes."

"I might be a thief," says Bucky, "or a murderer, or something worse, you don't know anything about me."

This is, in fact, what has been preying on Steve's mind—but Bucky's face is so incredibly, maddeningly familiar, like a dream forgotten upon waking, that suspicion and caution are overcome. "I don't think you are," he says. "I—maybe I'm wrong. But prove me wrong, then. Come and sleep in my apartment, I can't leave you out on the street. Please."

There is a long moment of hesitation, there on the steps of the station. Bucky's scarred hand curls into a fist. For a split second, Steve is quite convinced that Bucky will strike him in the face and dash away, onto the train that is coming rattling into the station, and Steve will never see him again.

Then Bucky's fist uncurls, and he nods, so slightly that in the gloom it is difficult to see.

Steve's apartment, when they arrive, is tiny. There is indeed a couch, but it is stuffed next to the mattress on the floor, so close that they would be a single unit were it not for the couch's height; there is what might be called a kitchen, which is not much more than a refrigerator and a stove at one end of the room and a microwave in the minuscule space between them; there is a bathroom, with a toilet and a tall, thin shower, through a door by the refrigerator. 

Steve fiddles his the alarm clock until it finally and with great grumbles consents to awake him at the appropriate time, turns, and sees Bucky hovering by the doorway. His left hand is still buried in his blanket, and he looks uncertain.

"Come on," Steve says, and gestures to the couch. "Do you need something to sleep in? I have extra pajamas," for Steve Rogers is indeed, reader, the sort of man who owns a grand total of four pairs of blue plaid pajama pants—in case, he says, he finds himself in need of a spare.

Bucky shakes his head, and goes to sit on the couch. He looks very uncertain there, dark and small in the chaotic, unconcerned hominess that is Steve's apartment, and Steve is struck quite suddenly by the knowledge that he has known this man less than twenty-four hours—that this is mad behavior, and more than that, possibly dangerous.

He says, "I'm going to turn out the light now. Is that all right?"

They fall into a routine, Bucky and Steve, over the next few weeks—for Bucky does sleep at Steve's apartment for every night of those few weeks, and he does _not_ murder Steve, dear reader, or steal from him, or do worse besides. He simply sleeps on Steve's couch—and eats Steve's food, and showers in Steve's bathroom, and wears Steve's clothes and the clothes that Steve buys him, all of which Steve is quite happy for him to do. And so it does not go unnoticed that Steve has acquired a new, unusual companion.

And it is because of this that, at six o'clock on a warm Saturday evening in early May, there is a sharp knocking on Steve's door.

Uncertain as to who it is—but assuming it must be a neighbor, for the door to the building is locked, and residents rarely lend out their keys—Steve opens it to find a lovely redhead in an black jacket, her hands on her hips.

"We're going out to eat," she informs him. "Just you and me."

Steve, who is not entirely startled—this is, after all, Natasha Romanoff, attorney at law, part-time punk rocker, and miracle worker extraordinaire, who could likely break into the White House if she tried, and can certainly break into a Bushwick apartment building—cannot help a smile. "All right," he says, and turns to look at Bucky, who is reading _The Brothers Karamazov_ on the couch.

"There's that leftover gourmet mac and cheese in the fridge, you can eat that," he says, "or you could have, um. I think that's the only thing that's in the fridge right now, actually. There might be some milk?"

Bucky nods.

"All right," says Steve, and closes the door behind him.

"So tell me about him," says Natasha, with uncharacteristic mildness, as Steve attempts to choke down chicken tikka masala. For reasons that Steve has never comprehended but that the reader may guess at, this is her favorite restaurant; though the food is average at best, it is without a doubt spicier than any food within a two-mile radius, and very few diners besides Natasha have proved themselves capable of keeping their concentration while eating.

Steve, whose face is extraordinarily red, looks thrown off-balance; Natasha, in turn, looks pleased. She is paying for the food, the position of frighteningly-effective-legal-wizard being somewhat more lucrative than that of children's book illustrator.

"I met him on my way to work," Steve tells her, when he has recovered the capacity to breathe, "back in April. He didn't have a place to stay, so."

"You met him on the subway?" says Natasha, who has not yet touched her tandoori.

"No," says Steve, "once I got off the subway, um."

Natasha tilts her head at Steve. She works for a semi-successful firm in upper Manhattan, and is younger than most of its employees at similar stages in their careers, in part because she is demonstrably more competent than they are. She enjoys leather jackets and Joan Jett, and her friendship with Steve has endured financial disparities, the bar exam, and one very poorly advised sexual encounter, which both of them subsequently agreed never to discuss again.

She has developed, over the years, a habit of cross-examining even her closest friends, and a decided unwillingness to accept their reluctance to discuss certain subjects; and so she taps her fork on the edge of her plate once, twice, and raises her eyebrows at Steve.

"So you bumped into him on the street?" she says. "And decided to strike up a conversation?"

"I actually," says Steve, and smiles, "I actually _tripped_ over him, which is how—"

"Tripped," says Natasha. "He was sitting on the street?"

Steve blinks, perhaps catching an edge in her tone. "It's not illegal to sit on the street," he says, more defensively than is required.

"It is in San Francisco," says Natasha, "but beside the point. Steve, is your new friend homeless?"

Catching the expression on his face, she gestures sharply with her fork. "It's fine if he is," she says. "There's nothing wrong with being homeless, poverty doesn't make you less of a person and all that, I'm not saying don't be friends with him. I just worry about you sometimes."

"Bucky's not dangerous," says Steve.

"I don't think he is," says Natasha. "This isn't about him, this is about _you_ , Steve. I just wonder about you and your—wounded ducks."

"Bucky isn't a wounded duck," says Steve, who has begun glaring at his tikka masala as if it has personally insulted him. 

Natasha, who is an extraordinarily clever woman if not an extraordinarily scrupulous one, hums under her breath. "How's your work going?" she says.

Astute readers may observe, as Natasha does, that Steve's scowl does not lessen in the least. "All right," he says. "Yours?"

"Fine," says Natasha. "We had a client recently—this old man in Bed-Stuy, his super infested his apartment with bedbugs to get him to move out, if you can believe it."

Steve's eyebrows raise. "Why'd he want him to move out so bad?"

"Well," Natasha says, "the street was gentrifying, and all these richer tenants were moving into the neighborhood, and he was black, and the super thought if he kept living there, he wouldn't be able to jack up the rent—"

She is unsurprised when Steve stabs at his chicken with uncharacteristic force; his face is still quite red, though he has not taken a bite of it in some time. "I just _hate_ ," he says, "I hate people who, who, who just take the time out of their day to make things _worse_ —who don't even think of other people as, as _people_ , just as numbers on a page, or as _things_ you can manipulate, like they're not worth as much as you are, like they don't—someone should _do_ something, there should be—"

"You can't save the world, Steve," says Natasha, and sips at her beer.

Steve is uncertain; then he blinks, and the anger slides from his face, replaced by suspicion. "There is a client in Bed-Stuy, isn't there?" he says.

"There is, but he'll be fine, he'll get enough in damages alone for an apartment twice the size of the old one," says Natasha. "I'm really fucking good at my job. You know I am."

"I know," says Steve. "I—Natasha, Bucky isn't some kind of project, I'm not trying to save him."

"You are," says Natasha through a mouthful of tandoori, "you're trying to save everybody, Steve, that's why I love you." She reaches across the table and ruffles his hair; he ducks away, petulant.

"He's my friend," he says. "I tripped over him on the sidewalk, I bought him coffee, was I supposed to just leave him on the street?"

Natasha swirls her glass of beer, watches the foam swish up onto the sides; she does love Steve, very much, and is, for once in her life, uncertain where to begin. "Do you remember back in freshman year of college, that night we got milkshakes with Sam," she says, "and I asked you why you wanted to be an artist?"

Steve does remember, but for reasons best known to himself, opts instead to scowl once again at his tikka masala.

"You said," Natasha says, "that you wanted to talk to people in a language they would understand. You wanted people not to have to go to a museum to see good art, but to be able to get art just by buying a book. You said," and here she smiles, "you were drunk, Steve, but you said you wanted to change the world."

"That doesn't have anything to do with Bucky," Steve says, takes another bite of his chicken, and immediately regrets it.

"How's your work going?" says Natasha, very mildly.

Whether Steve says nothing because his eyes are watering with pain or because he does not wish to discuss the subject, it is impossible to say.

"Sometimes art doesn't change the world, Steve," Natasha says, and watches him avoid her gaze. "Sometimes it's just art. You don't have to beat yourself up over that."

"He's my friend," says Steve. "He really is."

"I believe you," Natasha says, and shrugs. "You might want to ask him about himself, though. _The Brothers Karamazov_ isn't typical reading for someone you find sitting on the street." 

She pauses, and adds, "And his face looks familiar."

Reader, who among you has not once wanted to know a secret!

Perhaps not a vital secret; perhaps only a small and useless secret—the grade of a friend on the Spanish quiz, the sex of the new baby, what Santa Claus has brought for Christmas—but a secret nonetheless. Knowledge, or so they say, is power; and though none among us would think to give it that name, who has not wanted that power, in one form or another?

Steve, as readers may have guessed by now, was not a selfish man, or a grasping man. He was not even one of those men, more dangerous than most, who believes with all his heart that he only wants the best for others, and that for this reason he ought to be given control over them. As men went, he was more humble than most, and thought of others near-constantly; and perhaps his only fault, dear reader, was a certain over-willingness to involve himself in the lives of others.

And so late that night, as he and his friend lie in the darkness of his apartment, Steve Rogers cannot help but say: "You can tell me anytime, you know. About what happened to you."

But from the mass of shadows that is Bucky, there is no reply; and whether it is because he is asleep or because he is unwilling to answer, I cannot say.

The next day is a Sunday, bright and beautiful. There are four weeks out of the year, reader, during which New York resembles neither the surface of Venus nor the surface of Pluto—four weeks when neither the horror that is summer nor the horror that is winter have visited themselves upon the island, when the streets are free of dirty snow and hot garbage, when the sun is out and the breeze is cool and the parks are as yet mercifully empty of tourists, when every inhabitant of the city can sit upon a bench, glance at the sky, and sigh in some unnamable relief.

This is one of those weeks, and likely the last such week until October; and so Steve says to Bucky, his spoon poised over a bowl of Raisin Bran (for he is, reader, the sort of man who will willingly eat Raisin Bran), "When was the last time you were in Washington Square?"

Bucky, who refuses to eat any breakfast but severely burnt toast, shrugs. "Years," he says.

Steve is taken aback. "Years?" he says. "Didn't you live in Alphabet City?"

At Bucky's skeptical look, Steve tilts his head: "Well," he says, "they're not close, but they're not far away, I—but I guess you didn't head over in that direction." His face, already bright, brightens more. "It's a weekend," he says. "Let's go. We'll be able to see my favorite person in the city."

On the J train, passing over the Manhattan Bridge, Bucky says, "What's your friend's name?"

Steve looks surprised. "Who?"

"Your friend," Bucky says. "Your favorite person in the city."

Steve laughs. "No," he says, "he's not my friend. I've never spoken to him in my life."

Bucky looks bewildered, and the reader might well share his confusion; for after all, how can one's favorite person be a man whom one has never met? But fortunately for the reader—if not for Bucky—while his confusion lingers, ours may be resolved immediately, for Steve and Bucky arrive in the riot of spring greenery that is Washington Park quite soon afterwards—

And on a path in the middle of the park there is a piano.

And a man, playing it.

He is tall, and bony, and dressed in a pale blue shirt and jeans; he wears a pair of thick-rimmed rectangular glasses, and his hair is very red. His boots are black and well-worn, and covered with gold studs, and there are tattoos on his hands and on his arms.

He is sitting on a plastic bucket, with a black cushion atop it. Two more plastic buckets are on either side of him, a few coins and bills at their bottoms. There is no paper before him; he is playing the music, complex and classical and more than usually beautiful, from memory.

"That's my favorite person in the city," says Steve to Bucky, though he is not looking at Bucky but at the red-haired man at the piano, "the crazy piano guy. It's what he calls himself. He might even be my favorite person in America. Actually, he might be my favorite person in the world—"

Bucky turns and flees.

It takes Steve a moment to realize it: first there is the absence of Bucky at his side, then the noise of footsteps behind him, then he turns and sees him, sprinting across the square as if Hell itself were at his back. And then he is turning and running after Bucky, as fast as his legs will carry him.

He reaches Bucky at the western edge of the park, where the trees meet the sidewalk, and catches at his shoulder. Bucky spins, and Steve is taken aback, for his eyes are very wild. 

" _No,_ " Bucky says, with more vehemence than Steve has ever heard him speak.

"All right," says Steve, "all right, no. We won't go listen to the crazy piano guy," and he sees Bucky wince, though whether at "crazy" or "piano" he cannot say.

"We'll go to Union Square," he says. “And—we can talk?”

There is, for a brief moment in Bucky’s eyes, resistance; then it melts, and Bucky nods.

They make their way up Fifth Avenue and cut over to Broadway, shoulder past the acrobats surrounded by a teeming crowd, settle on benches in the shade. Steve looks at Bucky, quiet but expectant. Bucky looks at his knees.

"There was a man," he says, "who played the violin, in Italy, a long time ago. And one day he called the Devil to his room, and he said, make me a more beautiful violinist than anyone before or since, and the Devil said yes, but I'll take your soul. And the man said all right, that's fine with me."

"That was—a song," Steve says. "About a boy in Georgia—"

Bucky shakes his head. "Different story," he says. "But there was a man in Mississippi who played the guitar, and he went to a crossroads and said, Devil, let me play the blues, and the Devil said yes, but I'll take your soul. And the man said fine, that's fine, that's fine with me, that's fine—"

He comes to a stop; his breath is quick and violent and very shallow. Steve, who is not at all certain what to do, puts a hand on his back and rubs gently. To his relief, Bucky's breath slows, calms.

"Is this about the crazy piano guy?" Steve says.

It is difficult to see, but Bucky is shaking his head, very minutely. After a few days living with Steve, he has begun to wear his long hair up in a bun; it is coming loose now, and the strands are swaying about his face.

"Is this about you?" says Steve.

Just as minutely, Bucky nods.

Steve looks down at Bucky's lap, where his hands are twisting over each other, one scarred and one plain; and he notices, not for the first time, how long and nimble their fingers are, and how delicate they would both be if not for the scarring. And for the first time in his head he names them what he has long known them to be: the hands of a musician, the hands of a pianist, the hands of an artist.

Bucky's shoulders are shaking.

Steve does not stop rubbing his back.

An author might elaborate, here, upon the epiphanies and revelations that now burst like fireworks through our hero's brain; an author might list any number of emotions that rush through him like a subway train, one after another, leaving a sort of peaceful stillness in their wake.

But though his mind is open to us, dear reader, let us for now leave Steve's heart the private place he would like it to remain. What he feels shall be his own, for this moment at least; and the changes in him, as irreversible as the seismic shifts of tectonic plates, shall remain as secret as he would like them to be.

Though who among you, dear reader, has not once wanted to know a secret?

Let us remove ourselves, then, to the next day; it is a Monday, and Steve is in his office, sketching steadily. Bucky is at home, asleep on the couch; there is a new book on Steve's desk, for which he must draw a cover, and his mind is focused on nothing but line and form. 

The book, it goes without saying, is awful. Not in the technical sense; the story is smooth, the characters are distinct, Steve has every faith in the editors down the hall. No—this book is awful in its sheer dullness, in the flatness of its hero and the predictability of its ending; in how unwilling it is to hurt, to laugh, to scare, to tread untrod paths or to breathe unfamiliar air. It is awful in how impossibly un-awful it is, and Steve is almost driven mad with the well-run routine of it all. 

Almost driven mad—

And he thinks of Bucky.

Bucky had spoken of music; Bucky had spoken of deals with the Devil. Bucky had spoken of losing one's soul. And his musician's hands had twisted over each other, one scarred and one not, and his shoulders had shaken as if his heart was breaking.

Steve had, of course, lied to Natasha on Saturday night: he certainly remembered telling her that he wanted to change the world. He had been eighteen, and his head had been full of cheap vodka, and his heart had seemed about to overflow from his lips with how much of it there was; he had spoken what he felt. And he had been so very lucky to get his job.

But there are things he does not have the power to change, as lucky as he is, and he will not pretend this does not hurt him.

It hurts him, reader; it hurts him very much. It hurts him enough that he feels, sometimes, as if a cloud has enveloped him, one that is only exacerbated by the loneliness that he is more or less otherwise accustomed to. It is a voice inside him which tells him that everything would be all right, his worries would disappear and his loneliness would vanish, if he could only manage to do anything, _anything_ which left the world better than he had found it, anything which would justify his his existence before the great sweep of history before and after him.

And since he cannot even manage to do one thing like that, well—

(It speaks to the character of Steve Rogers, dear reader, that he would never in a hundred years think to judge his friends by this standard. Not for them this necessity; not for them the responsibility of holding up the universe on their shoulders. In Steve's mind, though he is not capable of articulating it, he is the only one whose life is not simply worthwhile by virtue of its own existence.)

Steve's pencil moves on the page, though his mind is miles away. He wonders—and cannot guess—what part of his soul Bucky lost. 

What would you do, reader? Steve goes to Sam Wilson's coffeeshop at lunch. 

As mentioned earlier, to befriend Sam is to befriend: the brightness and the solid, comforting gravity are the same. (Were Sam himself to hear this comparison, he might remark that like the sun, he is indeed the hottest thing in the solar system; reader, make your own judgments.) And so Steve has no hesitation about spilling to him the entire tale of Bucky, the park, and the piano man.

Sam frowns at Steve. "What'd Natasha say?" he says.

"Natasha doesn't know about what happened with the piano guy yet," says Steve. "But she thinks that Bucky is my, my pet project, or something." He wrinkles his nose; Sam, who has been loudly professing his undying love for Natasha for years and is well aware of just how often she is right, raises an eyebrow. 

"Have you learned his last name?" he says.

Steve makes a face, sips at his coffee, stays silent.

“All right,” says Sam. “You sure know this guy well.” 

“Anyway,” says Steve. “And work is just—well, you know how work is. Everything across my desk is—Jesus, and I’d talk to Maria and Sharon about it, but they _like_ their jobs, and it’s just—nothing’s good. Nothing’s working out.”

"Whatever problems you got going on at your office is something I can't fix," Sam says, and shrugs. "Man, I run a coffee shop. Natasha can't help you either, she's gonna be arguing cases in front of the Supreme Court by the time she's forty-five, she ain't on the ground with the rest of us normal folk. Your friend, I'm sure he's nice as hell, but all respect to him, he's _homeless_."

He stops, then, because Steve's knuckles have gone white on his coffee cup and his eyes wide with surprise, and Sam is very afraid that Steve is about to break one of his good mugs.

"Okay," Sam says, "what the hell is going _on_ in your head?" 

"He knows," says Steve, "that's what I'm trying to say, he knows what it's like to—to be an artist."

Sam raises his eyebrows. "Steve, man, I love you, but anybody ever tell you that you can be pretentious as hell?"

Steve frowns.

"Not pretentious," says Sam, "that's the wrong word, but c'mon, you _draw_ things, man, that’s all you do. I don't have the problems you have, but that doesn't mean I can't understand whatever the hell it is you're dealing with. I'm a damn good listener, and so's Natasha, and so are Maria and Sharon at work, for God's sake."

"You just said—" Steve begins, but Sam waves a hand.

"Nah," he says, "what I'm saying is, whatever it is about this guy that made you light up just now, when you talked about him, it ain't that he's part of some special artist secret society."

Steve, who has been staring into his coffee with increasingly reddening cheeks, says in a voice so quiet Sam strains to hear it, "I know. I just _like_ him."

"Well, there you go," says Sam, and grins at him so widely that Steve blushes bright red.

It is the first Monday of the month, and therefore, for Steve, his payday; and so he and Bucky go out to eat that night at a small, inoffensive restaurant near Steve's apartment, which sells hamburgers and alcoholic milkshakes and which smells strongly and inexplicably of Chinese food. Bucky has a worrying habit of licking ketchup from his fingers, which Steve is far too charmed by to mention.

They are discussing the latest episode of _Game of Thrones_ , which Steve has, with some guilt, recently torrented. Bucky adores Arya Stark; though Steve admires Arya, he has a soft spot in his heart for her sister, Sansa; both of them despise the Lannisters universally and without exception, a crime for which the offended reader must find it in their heart to forgive them.

Secretly, dear reader, Steve loves the show only because it is one of the few topics upon which he can persuade Bucky to be verbose. The news, the weather, even sports more often than not result in radio silence—only with select television shows and movies will Bucky light up like a Christmas tree, wave his hands about, even smile.

In these moments there is something of Bucky that is so unlike the exhausted man Steve found on the sidewalk in April that he is astonished. Bucky becomes bright, animated, confident; his smile is cocky, his back is straight, and his face is so familiar that Steve can almost, almost place it—

—and then the spell will break, and Bucky's hair will slip back down around his face, and whatever resemblance Steve saw will be gone as if it had never been.

Here in the restaurant, the spell has not broken, not yet—but what Steve notices is not the familiarity of his face.

Bucky is handsome.

Steve has known he likes men for—not forever, not since birth like some men claim, but certainly since his freshman year of college, when the combination of a bottle of very cheap beer and a stern talking-to from Natasha had led to one night of awkward exploration with Clint Barton from down the hall (which had subsequently led to a mutual promise to never, ever speak of the encounter again).

He has never had a boyfriend lasting longer than a month; he has only had one long-term girlfriend, Peggy Carter, who is currently a data analyst at a mysterious and frankly extremely shadowy organization in Virginia, and from whom he has not heard in several years. Steve is not sure if he knows how to have a boyfriend—he is not sure if he ought to have a boyfriend—he is not sure if Bucky ought to be his boyfriend, their relationship strange as it is—he is not sure if Bucky even likes him—

"You're staring at me?" says Bucky, the light fading from his face.

"No," says Steve, "sorry, I just drifted off for a second. Do you think Arya's old swordfighting teacher is going to—"

And without the question even having ended Bucky is off again, and Steve is free to watch him lick ketchup off his fingers, and wonder what on Earth they are to do next.

And then, suddenly and without warning, the decision is made for him.

It is a Saturday evening, warm and soft; far uptown, in Central Park, the fountain of Bethesda has sprung up at long last. Steve and Bucky are in Union Square, on a bench just beyond the statue of George Washington, watching the farmer's market pack up and tuck itself away into the night.

It has been two weeks since the incident with the piano man in Washington Square, and over a month since Bucky came to stay with Steve. At long last, the little apartment has begun to slip from an uncomfortable routine to a comfortable one. Steve has not said a word to Bucky about his quiet revelation in Sam Wilson's coffeeshop; instead, he has lain awake in the dark, listening to Bucky's slow and gentle breathing, and wondered.

Though the sun is not due to set for another hour, the sky has begun to cool into a deep and steady indigo. The clouds in the west are flaring into golds and pinks, and the wind is warm. Steve feels Bucky's warmth at his side and imagines: in another month, fireflies—

"James?"

At Steve's side, Bucky freezes.

The speaker is an old man, with dull dirty blond hair and white at his temples. The skin around his eyes is crinkled with smile lines, and his eyes themselves are very blue behind their glasses. He is dressed in a pale grey suit.

"James," he says again. "Is that you?"

Bucky has not moved, has not spoken, is not even breathing. Steve's heart is hammering like a rabbit's, though he cannot say why. He leans forward and says, "I think you have the wrong man."

The man in the grey suit says, "I don't think I do," and sticks out a hand to Steve. "Alexander Pierce."

"Steve Rogers," says Steve, and shakes, uncertain and full of inexplicable dread. The man's grip is like steel.

"Steve Rogers," Alexander Pierce repeats, and shakes his head. "Son, in less than a day you're going to be famous—"

Which is when Bucky begins to scream.

It is not a human noise. It is purely animal, and almost too unnatural to be that, as if it comes from some place other than his lungs. It is a shriek like metal scraping on metal, and Bucky's eyes are wide and full of panic and empty of reason, and his nails are digging hard into his knees, and Steve does not act on thought but on instinct and seizes Bucky’s hand and holds it tight and says "I'm here, I'm here, it's all right—"

Alexander Pierce grabs Bucky by the shoulders and shakes him hard. "For Christ's sake," he says, "is this what you've been doing all this time? Acting like some deranged nutcase, trying to get yourself sent back to the loony bin? Pull yourself together, James, we're going home."

Steve stands up and says, "I think you had better leave."

Alexander Pierce looks up at him. "Do you know who this is?" he says. Bucky is still screaming, high and faint; he does not appear to notice.

"This is my friend Bucky," says Steve. "You're upsetting him. I think you had better leave."

"This is James Barnes," says Alexander Pierce. “James Buchanan Barnes.”

The name sounds vaguely familiar. Steve repeats, "I think you had better leave," and adds, " _Now_ ," for good measure.

They are beginning to attract attention. Steve sees, in the distance, two uniformed men approaching—park officials. Bucky is still screaming, but his voice is hoarser now, and he is beginning to take great gulps of breath, as if he is drowning.

"James Barnes?" says Pierce. "Don't tell me you haven't heard of him—he's been in New York this entire time?" He shakes his head, disgusted. "We looked for him back in Chicago, we thought he would stay there. Should have known he would have wanted to slink back to this awful, godforsaken city—"

For a brief moment, it is all Steve can manage not to punch Alexander Pierce very hard in the face.

It is only the arrival of the park officials that saves him: a man and a woman, both of whom look very out of their depth. "Is there a problem here, gentlemen?" says the man.

"This man is harassing my friend," says Steve, looking hard at Pierce. "He won't leave him alone."

"This is James Barnes," says Pierce. "The pianist? For Christ's sake, I've only been looking for this man across the country for a year, this is going to make the front page—" 

"This is my friend Bucky," says Steve. "I don't know who this man thinks he is, but he needs to leave Bucky alone."

The police officers look from Pierce to Steve and back again, and Steve is suddenly, perilously uncertain who they will believe—

And then Bucky in one fluid motion stands up and takes off running past the statue of George Washington, down the steps, and through the crowds to the busy intersection.

Pierce swears. Steve, who never swears, lets out a harsh breath and takes off after Bucky. Pierce is behind him—Steve can hear his footsteps—but Pierce must be seventy or eighty, and Steve has the advantage of youth and athleticism, and of Sunday mornings running with Sam along the riverbank. And besides, he has the advantage of knowing where Bucky is going.

And it is indeed not long before Pierce's footsteps recede in the distance, and Steve can take the right onto University and dash south, south, until the tall green trees of the park rise before him and he can see Bucky's ponytail—not so far ahead after all—by the eastern gates.

This time he does not have to catch his shoulder; Bucky slows to a stop on his own.

Steve says, "I outran him. We should still hide, though."

Bucky says nothing. But he does duck around the blazing gold street lamp, pace onward into the park, and Steve follows.

On the path in the middle of the park, there is a piano.

The man playing it takes no notice of them; he appears to be taking no notice of anything. He is surrounded by a small crowd, enough to fill the benches on either side of the path, and there is a very old and wrinkled woman dancing slowly and carefully with her very old and wrinkled husband behind him.

Bucky goes still—not the sick, frozen stillness of earlier, as if he is wound tight and about to snap, but hesitating, unhappy. Steve—though he is not at all certain it is the right thing to do—reaches out, takes his good right hand.

He does not know what the man is playing – he knows little, if anything, about classical music. But it sounds sad, and slow, and the old couple dancing at the piano man's back is clutching tight, as if afraid they will lose each other.

Steve tugs at Bucky's hand, very gently. There is an empty bench a little ways from where the piano stands.

It takes a long time for Bucky to be able to speak. Steve waits, patient, rubbing circles into his good hand with his thumb. He keeps one eye on the sidewalk—but Alexander Pierce never appears. Perhaps the police have caught up with him.

Bucky says, unexpected and hoarse, "I was famous."

Steve says nothing.

"I played at Carnegie Hall," says Bucky, "and the audience was always sold out. It wasn't—you wouldn't know me if you didn't, if you weren't someone who cared about that kind of thing. But if you did, I was famous."

He presses at his eyes with his scarred hand. "I played at more places than Carnegie Hall. I played for rich people, for—I played for a lot of politicians. Alexander was always in charge. He knew me since I was a kid. I had been playing since I was a kid, and Alexander was always in charge of what I did and where and when."

"It starts to," he begins, and then stops. His grip tightens on Steve's.

"Say what you can say," says Steve, quiet.

Bucky closes his eyes, rubs his free hand across them. "I'm not going to lie," he says, "I loved it. I hated it but I, I loved it, and I hated that I loved it, I—I got to play the most beautiful music, the best music there is. I got to do it better than anyone else. I was the one who could put that music in the world and I _was_ putting it in the world, and—"

He stops, shakes his head again.

"I don't think I was ever really," he says. "Healthy. I don't think I was ever really happy. I don't remember ever really being happy." He shakes his head. "That's not right. I was happy when I was, when I was playing. And then I would stop, and it would all—slam down on me, and it was like I couldn't breathe, or talk, or see—" He shakes his head again, harder this time.

Steve says, "Why?"

Bucky shrugs, looks at his knees. "Partially it was Pierce, he was—he wasn't. He meant well. He helped me go—really good places." His nails are digging into his leg.

"Partially?" Steve says.

"Partially it was," says Bucky, "I didn't like—having to play for anyone they wanted me to, and go to these places, and I couldn't do what I liked or what I loved and—I know that's not how it works. I know that's not how it works in the real world. I know you have to grow up, I know—"

Steve presses his shoulder into Bucky's, waits until the shaking stops.

"And partially," Bucky says, quieter than he's ever been, "partially it's that this is me, this is the way I've always been. This is something my brain just does."

"So," says Steve.

"So it was September," says Bucky, "and I was here, in the city."

And then the niggling at the back of Steve's brain, the familiarity he can't name, snaps clear and vivid into his head. He closes his eyes. "You were in the news," he says.

Bucky's nostrils flare. "What did it say?"

"Not anything," says Steve. "Just James Barnes, pianist, didn't complete his show, rumors of drama, noises from backstage—" 

Bucky looks at his knees, says, "That was me screaming."

Steve says nothing.

"I don't remember this," says Bucky. "They told me what happened later, at the hospital, before I—left. They said I was backstage, and that no one knows where I got it from, but somehow I suddenly had, a, a—knife—"

He breaks off, and flexes his fingers. Steve looks at them, and feels his stomach swoop: scars, shallow and deep and long and short, on every square inch of Bucky's left hand. 

"And then," says Bucky, "the hospital. It was in Chicago. Which is where Alexander is. And then in October I, well, I left the hospital, and I came back to New York, and I still wasn't—in my head—" He shakes his head again. "I'm still, I'm not. I'm better than I was. But there's still enough of me that's—not okay."

He flexes the scarred fingers of his left hand again, and holds it up to eye level. "And I can't play piano again," he says, quiet. "Not ever. Not like I could."

Steve leans over very slowly, giving Bucky time to duck away, and kisses him gently on the corner of his mouth.

"All right," he says.

Bucky glances at him, squeezes his hand hard. His eyes are wide. "All right?"

"All right," says Steve.

Bucky stares at him for a long, frozen moment—and then he kisses Steve, very quickly, and pulls back almost immediately. He looks like a startled deer.

To their right, the piano man is playing something new, something brighter. The old couple has sat down on a bench, his arm around her waist. Bucky says, his voice barely a whisper, "Let's go home."

They sleep, that night, both on the mattress, tangled into each other. They'd spoken on the subway home, soft and uncertain, fingers intertwined: Steve had asked questions, Bucky had answered as best he could. The train had rattled over the bridge and down into Brooklyn, and the city had been alight with silver and gold.

And on Steve's mattress, reader, we shall for now leave them.

For it is not the next day when we shall see them again—but after six weeks, six long weeks of heat and humidity, of the stink of trash on the streets and the dull irritation that creeps through the air like smoke, of the boiling days and the heavy nights—and of Steve's mattress, dear reader, and the events that occur therein.

And therefore after six weeks of kisses, and Bucky's rare smiles, and dull amusing television shows, and warm nights by the water, we shall find our heroes once again—

—and find them thusly: 

It is June, the last days of June. She has bid the city goodbye with a long few days of thunder and torrents, and the sidewalks are shining with damp, puddles vanishing into themselves in the hot sun. The sky is wiped clean; the sunlight is spreading outward from the red skyline, the air hot and humid and oppressive. Night is coming.

"We could watch Gossip Girl," says Steve.

Bucky makes a face; his body is warm pressed into Steve's, his arm wrapped around Steve's shoulders. "You actually _like_ Gossip Girl?"

"It's not about liking the show," Steve protests, "it's about liking Serena. She's the best."

"Not when you put her next to Blair for five minutes," says Bucky, "and Gossip Girl is awful, anyway. We could watch Scott Pilgrim vs. the World." 

Steve groans into the crook of Bucky's arm. "You want to watch a movie where the punchline is that the bi evil ex-girlfriend is defeated by orgasms? We could watch Once Upon a Time—" He stops. "Actually, let's not watch Once Upon a Time, let's not do that."

"I like Once Upon a Time," says Bucky. "How do you not like Once Upon a Time? It's like candy for your brain."

"Too many fairy tales," says Steve. "Too much like work, it's just so—Disney. I get enough children’s lit in the rest of my day." 

"X-Men 2, then," says Bucky. "Everybody likes X-Men 2."

"I like X-Men 2," Steve agrees comfortably, "and you can go and pick up the takeout."

Bucky sits up, tugs his arm out from under Steve's body. The night is all heat and humidity, and the fan in Steve's apartment's window is whirring at full blast; Steve watches Bucky cross the room and duck out the door, his footsteps thumping down the stairs a moment later.

It is a weeknight. Steve's eyes are aching from staring at his sketchpad all day; he pulls up X-Men 2 and lets it buffer, achingly slowly, as he waits for Bucky to return.

And at this point, dear reader, he makes a decision not altogether wise.

It has been six weeks since Bucky's confession, and not once in this time has Steve allowed himself to search for information on James Barnes. It is not who Bucky is now, Steve knows. It is someone who Bucky would prefer to disappear into the past. Bucky is the person Steve knows, the person he kisses, the person he lies sleeping with on these hot summer nights. James Barnes is not. 

And yet!

And yet Steve opens another tab and types into the search bar, _James Buchanan Barnes_ , and waits, slow and painful, for the page of results to load.

Bucky has his own Wikipedia page.

Steve cannot scan it for too long without feeling a swoop of guilt in his stomach: this is information that Bucky has not shared, information that by all rights Bucky ought to pass along in his own time. He was born in New York; he has not seen his parents for many years; he won certain competitions very young; his birthday is in March.

There is a brief paragraph on his disappearance. Steve cannot read it. He returns to the page of search results, runs his fingers through his hair, glances away from the computer. 

When he glances back, there is a video of Bucky on a stage, a piano in front of him.

Steve clicks on it.

And there is Bucky—but no, not Bucky, there is so little of Bucky in this man's eyes and hands and face that Steve barely recognizes him. This is James Barnes, smiling and brilliant, his hair is short, and his hands are both smooth and clean.

But James Barnes' face—Christ, it's beyond anything Steve's ever seen. It's not concentration, not confidence, not calm. It's just joy.

And then the music ends, and James opens his eyes, stands and bows, and it's like the sun has vanished from the sky, like a shutter has gone down over something bright and beautiful in him, and all Steve can see is the ghost of Bucky, hovering in the shadows of James' face—

The door opens.

On Steve's laptop, the pixelated James Barnes says, "Thank you."

Behind Steve, Bucky drops the wonton soup.

The plastic carton cracks the moment it hits the floor; the soup trickles out onto the hardwood floor. Steve slams the laptop shut, says, "Jesus, Bucky, I am so, so sorry," jumps up to grab paper towels—but stops. Bucky's not moving. His eyes are wide, and his fists are clenched, and there is something panicked and inhuman in his face.

"What the fuck," says Bucky. His breathing is shallow.

"I'm so, so sorry," Steve repeats, and then, though he knows he should not say it but cannot stop himself, "Bucky, you were _really good_."

"What the fuck," says Bucky again, and then, quicker, "What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck what the fuck whatthefuck whatthefuck whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck—" He breaks off; he is shaking his head, his eyes are wide, he is not breathing, his face is turning a dark red.

"Hey," says Steve, and takes a step towards him before he thinks better of it—Bucky looks like a frightened animal, Christ, what is he supposed to _do_ —"hey, hey, Bucky, Bucky, I—" Something from a brief yoga session with Sam resurfaces. "Okay," he says, "I'm going to count, I'm going to count to four, and you can breathe in when I count to four and out when I count to eight. Okay?"

Bucky's breath has changed to something fast and shallow—better than no breath at all—but his face is still frozen in a picture of twisted fear. Steve says, because he does not know what else to do, "One—two—three—four," and then, when Bucky's breath jerks in, "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Again? One, two, three, four—good, Bucky, I'm really proud of you, I—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven eight. You can do this, you're doing such a good job—one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, four—"

Bucky's breath is evening out, growing slower and deeper. The muscles in his face are relaxing from their rictus—

—he closes his eyes. 

Steve stops counting at last, lets himself look down and away.

From the other side of the room, Bucky says, "I haven't done that since. Since October."

"I am so sorry," says Steve. He can't look at Bucky.

"I haven't done that since October," says Bucky, sounding distant and faraway. 

"I won't ever," Steve promises, "not ever again, Bucky, Jesus, I'm so—"

"I thought I was better," says Bucky, and then, louder, "I thought I was better, I thought I got better, I thought I was fucking—" and then he cuts himself off, and Steve looks up: Bucky's fists are so tightly clenched that the knuckles are white. His nails must be digging into his palms almost enough to break skin. 

He takes a step towards Bucky, and then, when Bucky does not tense, another, and another, and then he reaches out to Bucky and takes his hand, rubs his thumb over the knuckles.

"Do you want to talk?" he says.

Bucky looks up, and Steve sees again, for a brief moment, that same flash of something blank and animal in his eyes—and then Bucky turns away, pulls his fist roughly out of Steve's hands.

"I was really good?" he says.

Steve says nothing. He can’t look at him.

"I was," Bucky says, "I _was_ really good, I was better than really good, I was incredible, _fuck_. Fuck fuck fuck _fuck_ , I was goddamn _fantastic_." 

"You were," says Steve. "I don't know anything about—any of that, the music, but Bucky, you were—" 

"Fuck _you_ ," says Bucky again, louder, "what is that supposed to do for me? How the hell is that supposed to make anything better?"

"I—" Steve says. He can't speak.

Bucky's mouth is tight, his eyes are too-bright; he says, "That's the idea, right? Fix me up? Children's book illustration isn't getting you off, so you grab a hobo off the street to be your charity project instead?"

Steve takes a step back. "That's not it," he says. "That's not why I—Bucky—"

"I _don't_ get better," says Bucky, "I think we learned that today, didn't we? I go months and months without looking crazy but it turns out I _am_ still crazy, it turns out I don't get to go back, it turns out my hand is still broken and I'm still a goddamn nutcase and I don't get better, I don't get better, it never fucking goes _away_."

"You weren't ever my—charity project," says Steve. "Bucky, Jesus, I never—I just wanted to make you better—"

He knows, immediately, that there is no worse thing he could have said.

"Fuck you," says Bucky, and walks out the door.

A moment later, his footsteps are clattering down the stairs.

Reader, there are a hundred hurts in this world; afflictions of the mind, afflictions of the body, afflictions of the spirit. And in all those hundred hurts, spread across seven billion souls over two hundred thousand years—oh, reader, I have found none more painful than heartbreak.

Bucky does not return.

He has no cellphone, no credit card, no identification; Steve knows he has no hope of finding him. Apart from Steve and Alexander Pierce, it is likely that no one in New York knows that Bucky and James Barnes are the same person—and if all of Pierce's men could not find James Barnes, how can Steve ever track Bucky down if he does not want to be found?

Steve goes to work; he returns. There is a stain on his hardwood floor from where the soup spilled. There is a stain on his hardwood floor, and there is no one who sleeps with him on his mattress and no one who sleeps on his couch, and his apartment is bare and empty, and there is a stain on his hardwood floor.

And then it is four days after Bucky disappears, and July, and the city is streaked with red and white and blue. It has been a long day at work, and Steve is exhausted, a bone-deep exhaustion that feels like a dim and gloomy sadness hanging heavy on his shoulders.

The little stairwell leading up to his apartment is like the inside of an oven. Steve’s feet are on the last stairs before his landing, and then his keys are in the lock, and then his hand is on the doorknob—

—and then he opens his door, and the world explodes in color and sound.

His apartment is crammed with people. He sees Natasha in the back, and Sam very near the door—and Maria and Sharon from work, and Mr. Fury, who Steve had thought secretly slept in a coffin in the office, and his old high school friends Dum Dum and Jim Morita and Montgomery and Gabe and Jacques, and even—Jesus, even Peggy Carter, looking haggard but happy in a corner, with her arm around a man Steve doesn't know, and more, all of Steve's friends, all of the people who love him— 

—all of them shouting, "Happy birthday!"

Which Steve, dear reader, had completely forgotten.

He is pulled into his apartment by Sam, who is smiling bright enough to light the city; Dum Dum presses a glass of whiskey on him; Peggy hugs him tight and warm, smelling of some expensive perfume and, strangely, gunpowder. There is music playing from a radio on the kitchen counter, which is certainly not Steve's. Every inch of space not crammed with people is filled with streamers and balloons.

“You guys,” says Steve, stunned. “You—I had no idea.”

“That’s why they call it a surprise, Steve,” says Natasha, a glass of wine in her hand. She’s smiling.

"It's not your birthday every day of the year," says Dum Dum. "Let's have some fun!"

And there are congratulations, and there is more whiskey, and there is warmth and laughter and light, and Steve feels inside his chest, light and unfamiliar, happiness blooming like a flower. He is surrounded by friends, friends who have crossed the country to come and see him. He is surrounded by friends, and it is his birthday, and he is another year older.

He says to Peggy’s boyfriend, because he is the nearest person not occupied, “Thank you.”

“You’re absolutely welcome,” says Peggy’s boyfriend, and smiles at him.

It is only when they have gotten to the cake, baked by Sam in his coffeeshop's kitchen and covered with strawberries, that Steve hears footsteps on the stairs.

He turns to the door, hope flaring wildly for a moment in his chest, and thinks for a moment that the door opens—but then Jim Morita tugs on his sleeve, says, "So what the hell are you _doing_ uptown all day?" and when Steve looks back, the door is as firmly shut as it has ever been, and he must let the sound slip to the back of his mind. 

Until, a minute later, he notices Natasha is missing.

He scans the apartment for her; it isn't large. She is simply gone, and though it is very like Natasha to move like a ghost—he has no doubt that she is the one who let all his friends into his apartment, though he certainly did not lend her a key—it is very unlike her to depart without saying goodbye.

"I'm," he says to Dum Dum, who has entered a state of enormously cheerful drunkenness and who has been only half-carrying on a conversation with him for the past few minutes, and jerks his thumb to the door. Dum Dum gestures expansively and generously, and Steve maneuvers his way to the door, very quietly slips out.

He does not know what makes him turn up the stairs, instead of down. They are steep, and by the time he reaches the door that leads out to the roof, he is panting, and unsure, and he steps through the door and shuts it very quietly behind him—

"He doesn't get it," says Bucky.

He and Natasha are on the edge of the roof, the city is spread out before them. The apartment building is tall enough that, from here, you can see all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge. Their backs are to Steve; they are leaning on the wall that surrounds the roof.

Steve freezes. Then he moves, as quietly as he can—there is a wide, tall electrical box in between him and Bucky and Natasha, and he crouches down silently behind it.

"He doesn't get it," Bucky repeats, and he sounds tired. "I came back to —but I can't talk to him like this, not when he's with all these people. Not when he's with people from, from his work." 

"He's always been strange about his work," says Natasha, mild. 

There's a soft huff from Bucky that might be a laugh. "Yeah. Strange."

"It's not just art, to him," Natasha says. "It's not enough for it to be art, Not like it was for you."

The silence stretches, and stretches.

Bucky says, eventually, "How did you know about me?" 

"I'm a lawyer," says Natasha. "It's my job to know things about people." She pauses, then says, so quiet Steve has to strain to hear it, "I won't tell anyone."

"Thanks," says Bucky. The wind is sweeping across the roof, a blessed wash of coolness on Steve's face; he tilts his head back, watches the dull goldenness of the clouds move through the night sky.

"What do you mean," Bucky says, after some time, "it's not enough for it to be art?"

Natasha sighs; it is a long sigh, one that seems to come from her bones. "We all want to be meaningful, James." There's a beat. "Can I call you James?"

"You can," says Bucky.

"All right," says Natasha. "So we all want to be meaningful. We all want to make an impact, we all want to be worth something. Steve more than most, maybe. The day he finally makes the world better is the day he'll finally be happy." 

"He does make the world better," says Bucky, sounding faintly surprised. "Already."

Steve misses whatever it is Natasha says next, because his eyes are suddenly stinging. When he can see again, Natasha is saying, "—but on an individual level."

"I don't understand," says Bucky.

"All right," says Natasha. "Look at it this way. Me, I'm a lawyer. I dug myself into a pit of student loans and nearly killed myself trying to pass the bar exam because I wanted to be a lawyer, and I wanted to be a lawyer because I wanted to be able to effect change. And I'm a really fucking good lawyer, and someday I'm going to effect change in a big way, and that's the meaningful work I do. Right?"

"Right," says Bucky, though he sounds uncertain.

"Now, take Sam Wilson," says Natasha, "downstairs. Sam runs a coffeeshop. And he smiles at people a lot, and half of them end up his friends, and the other half have better days because he was in them. Sam makes the world better, and it doesn't mean anything that that he doesn't change society. He helps people on an individual level. That's the meaningful work he does. You with me?"

"Yeah," Bucky says.

"Steve has always," Natasha says, "as long as I've known him, wanted to change the world. Steve wants to do big, sweeping meaningful work. Art for art's sake isn't enough for him, it never has been."

She laughs, a little. "But he also wants to do smaller meaningful work, the kind Sam does, on an individual level. And I think when he first met you, yes, James, you were meaningful work." 

"That's what I mean," Bucky says. "I'm not work. I’m not."

"No," Natasha says, "you're not work. Not any more."

Bucky is silent.

"He sees you as a kindred spirit," Natasha says. "A fellow artist."

"But I'm not an artist either," Bucky says, his voice hard. "I'm—" He pauses, and Steve can imagine him shaking his head. "I thought that I might, that with him I might be better. That I might be able to be James Barnes again—but my hand is still my hand, and I still can't see myself playing without—and I thought I wasn't crazy any more, I thought it went away—"

Natasha says, "Wanna know a secret?"

"What?" says Bucky.

"It doesn't go away," Natasha says. "Not ever."

There is a long, long pause. Bucky says, his voice strangled, "What."

"You don't get to go back," Natasha says, quiet. "You don't. I'm sorry."

" _Fuck_ you," says Bucky, high-pitched, almost terrified. "What do you mean, it doesn't go away, what the hell kind of thing is that to say—" 

"I mean you don't get a magic eraser that makes it never have happened," Natasha says. "You don't get a miracle cure. You don't wake up one day with everything better. It never happens."

"Fuck _off_ ," says Bucky.

Natasha says, "Wanna know another secret?"

"No," Bucky says. " _No,_ fuck you."

"You get to keep waking up," Natasha says.

Now the silence stretches longer. Bucky says, "What?" 

"You don't get to go back," Natasha says, her voice so soft Steve can barely hear it. "You just get to go forward."

"How the fuck would you know?" says Bucky, thin.

There is a rustle of leather from the edge of the roof; Natasha is shrugging. "We don't all have scars, James. You want the medical report?"

"Oh," Bucky says, "oh," and there is a noise from Natasha, as if the breath has suddenly left her; Bucky must have caught her up in a hug. She’s laughing, quietly.

"He loves you," she says, her voice muffled. "You know that, right?"

"I know that," says Bucky. "I—yeah."

"He might not be very good at it yet," she says.

"Okay," says Bucky. "I'll try to remember that."

"And," Natasha says, and now her voice is closer to Steve, she must be walking away, and Steve freezes—"I'm just saying, if you ever need blowjob tips—"

"Jesus!" says Bucky, and now he's laughing, hard, and Natasha passes by the electrical box on her way to the door and sees Steve crouched down in its shadow.

She smiles at him, completely and utterly unsurprised; then she opens the door and vanishes down the stairs.

Steve stands up and says, "Hi."

"Hi," says Bucky, from the edge of the roof. He, too, looks unsurprised to see Steve, and Steve has a sudden vision of him and Natasha signaling to each other, behind his back.

This friendship, he thinks, is going to be terrifying.

"Happy birthday," Bucky says.

Steve feels a smile spread across his face, warm and helpless. "Yeah. Thanks."

And then, behind Bucky's back, the fireworks burst over the Brooklyn Bridge, a shower of gold and red and blue, stars falling like angels into the city beneath; and though it is a cliche, and because it is a cliche, Steve crosses the roof and kisses Bucky, as hard as he can.

And then—

It may be a week later; it may be a month later. It may be years later, and the world may have changed, and our heroes changed with it. It may be the next day.

Washington Square Park is alive with greenery, squirrels dashing from branch to branch, pigeons fluttering in dark-winged flocks across the fountain to land at the base of a bench. The sun is warm, and the wind is cool.

On a path in the middle of the park, there is a piano.

Steve says, "Are you sure?"

"No," says Bucky, "Jesus, no." He runs his good right hand through his hair. "Either I play like a genius or my hand is so screwed up that I can't play a note. Do I get any middle ground?"

Steve shrugs, wide and helpless. "Don't ask me."

"Okay," says Bucky, "okay, okay," runs his hand through his hair again. He has let it grow, but his buns have become steadily less messy. Natasha has begun offering—or threatening, Steve cannot tell which—to give him a French braid. 

"Go and ask him," Steve says. "Before he starts on another song."

"Right," says Bucky, "right," and he steps purposefully towards the piano man, says something to him that Steve cannot hear.

The piano man looks startled—and then Steve sees on his face a flash of recognition; of course, the piano man is a professional musician, he knows very well who Bucky is. But he says nothing, only nods, slides off his bucket, tilts his head at Bucky. 

Bucky sits down. 

Steve crosses the space between them quickly. "You're doing it?" he says. "You can do it?" 

"Let’s see," says Bucky, and spreads his fingers on the keys.

And this, dear reader, is where we leave them. 

Did they live happily ever after? I must confess that I cannot tell you; I do not know. Even if I did, I almost certainly would not say.

But, reader—they lived. Not all of us can say the same.

So we leave them here, in a park bright with green, beside a piano, in a city beginning its long journey towards the sparkling night. And for now let us call them happy, and for now let us call ourselves content.

And as for this moment, dear reader—well, what shall we call it?

Let us call it the end.

**Author's Note:**

> The piano guy is, believe it or not, real; his name is Colin, and he plays a baby grand in Washington Square three days a week. The author is not encouraging you to go and give him a lot of money, but she is also not encouraging you not to go and do that.
> 
> Steve and Bucky's views on various movies, Game of Thrones, and the children's publishing industry do not by any means reflect the author's.
> 
> Apart from that, everything is real except the restaurants.


End file.
